About IGSB

Core Members

The University of Chicago

Robert GrossmanProfessor, Department of Medicine, Section of Genetic Medicine

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Dr. Grossman is the Director of Informatics at IGSB, a Senior Fellow at the Computation Institute, Chief Research Informatics Officer for the Division of the Biological Sciences, University of Chicago, and Professor of Medicine in the Section of Genetic Medicine at the University of Chicago. His research group focuses on bioinformatics, data mining, cloud computing, data intensive computing, and related areas. Current research projects include: Bionimbus (http://www.bionimbus.org), a cloud-based system for managing, analyzing and sharing genomic data and Sector/Sphere (sector.sourceforge.net), a cloud-based system for data intensive computing. He is also interested in developing new algorithms for the large scale analysis of genomic and phenotypic data.

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Research in the Moellering Lab lies at the interface of chemistry and biology, with an eye towards understanding and intervening in human disease. By integrating chemical synthesis, cell biology and mass spectrometry platforms, our research aims to identify novel biological mechanisms underlying diseases such as diabetes and cancer, and to subsequently develop innovative diagnostic and therapeutic modalities to impact these disorders. We are specifically interested in developing new chemical tools and technologies to study complexity and dynamics in the proteome, thus enabling targeted manipulation of protein targets and the pathways they govern.

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Michael Rust, head of the Rust lab, is interested in elucidating how information processing and decision-making functions in a live cell arise robustly from the stochastic interactions of individual molecules, and how these systems malfunction in diseased states. To this end, the lab employs quantitative fluorescence microscopy and biochemical measurements closely coupled with data-driven mathematical modeling. We have recently been interested in a three-protein clock found in photosynthetic bacteria. The post-translational interactions between these proteins (KaiA, KaiB and KaiC) generate a self-sustained 24 hour oscillation capable of predicting the time of day based on previous environmental cues.

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Dr. Rzhetsky’s interest is in (asymptotic) understanding how phenotypes, such as human healthy diversity and maladies, are implemented at the level of genes and networks of interacting molecules. To harvest as much information about known molecular interactions as possible, his group runs a large-scale text-mining effort aiming at analysis of a vast corpus of biomedical publications. Currently they can extract from text automatically about 500 distinct flavors of relations among biomedical entities (such as bind, activate, merystilate, and transport)

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Dr. Barbara Stranger has a longstanding interest in population genetics and gene regulatory processes, and how these shape phenotypic variability. Her lab collects and analyzes multi-dimensional human genomics data, particularly transcriptome data and genetic variation data, in the context of health and disease.

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Savas Tay is a systems biologist and bioengineer who works at the interface of biology, physics, and engineering. His overarching goal is to understand how biological systems work from an engineer’s perspective, and use this knowledge to manipulate cells and gene pathways to help cure diseases. On the technology front, his lab develops high-throughput and high-content single-cell analysis devices by integrating microfluidics and optics.

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Dr. White is a pioneer in combining experimental and computational techniques to understand the networks of factors that control biological systems during development and evolution. He has developed novel integrated systems biology approaches for studying complex diseases and identifying new diagnostic biomarkers for a variety of cancer types.

Argonne National Laboratory

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Dr. Antonopoulos joined the IGSB and Biosciences Division at Argonne National Laboratory in June 2008 and holds a joint appointment in the Department of Medicine, Section of Gastroenterology, at the University of Chicago. Dr. Antonopoulos is a microbiologist interested in studying the formation and development of microbial communities.

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Jack Gilbert's primary research interest revolves around modeling microbial ecosystem dyanmics using high-throughput sequencing data that describes the taxonomic and functional diversity of the system. Combined with physical, chemical and other biology variables measured in each ecosystem, he is working towards generating bioclimatic models of microbial ecosystems, that enable prediction of taxonomic and metabolic potential from remote sensing data (satellites and aircraft) across broad geographic and temporal space. Fundamentally, he adheres to a system biology model, within which he is to describe the community dynamics that yield the ecosystem services that humanity has come to rely on.